This paper describes the creation of a new humanities digital library collection: 11,000,000 words and 10,000 images representing books, images and maps on pre-twentieth century London and its environs. The London collection contained far more dense and precise information than the materials from the Greco-Roman world on which we had previously concentrated. The London collection thus allowed us to explore new problems of data structure, manipulation, and visualization. This paper contrasts our model for how humanities digital libraries are best used with the assumptions that underlie many academic digital libraries on the one hand and more literary hypertexts on the other. Since encoding guidelines such as those from the TEI provide collection designers with far more options than any one project can realize, this paper describes what structures we used to organize the collection and why. We particularly emphasize the importance of mining historical "authority lists" (encyclopedias, gazetteers, etc.) and then generating automatic "span-to-span" links within the collection.

ing with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works, requires prior speci#c permission and#or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., 1515 Broadway, New York, NY 10036 USA, fax +1 #212# 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. 2 # J. Furner, D. Ellis, and P. Willett 1. INTRODUCTION The creation of the intra-document links between the individual components of a hypertext document is a di#cult and time-consuming task #Westland 1991#, but one in which human intervention has commonly been thought necessary if the semantic relationships that exist between the components of the document are to be made explicit. A similar view has prevailed for many years with regard to the indexing of documents in information retrieval #IR# systems, where the existence of well-established systems for automatic indexing #Salton 1989# has not prevented the widespread use of tr...

1.1 Motivation and Research Problem................. 2 1.1.1 A motivating scenario.................... 2 1.1.2 Theoretical constraints.................... 4